This application makes reference to and claims all benefits accruing under 35 U.S.C. Section 119 from an application for CONTROL DEVICE FOR DISPLAYING A SHORT MESSAGE IN REAL TIME IN A DIGITAL MOBILE STATION AND METHOD THEREFOR filed earlier in the Korean Industrial Property Office on Jul. 28, 1999 and there duly assigned Serial No. 30936/1999.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a control device and method for displaying a short message in a digital mobile station. More particularly, a control device and method for displaying in real time the short message sent sporadically by a telecommunication service provider to a digital mobile station.
2. Description of the Related Art
A conventional digital mobile station usually provides the user with a short message service (SMS) feature through which the short character messages can be exchanged as well as the ordinary voice communication signals. The SMS function has been widely adapted to be used in the digital mobile communications system. Accordingly, a digital mobile station is equipped with a device for editing, inputting and sending the short message. In such digital mobile station, the received short message is stored into a non-volatile memory from which it can be retrieved by the user through a specially designated key function.
Although this key function feature serves to provide the user with privacy by preventing the private short message to be accessed by others, it also causes inconvenience to the user as the user has to manipulate the key operation to retrieve any message including the non-important SMS messages forwarded by the mobile communication service provider, such as public notices or advertisements. Thus, the user is inconvenienced by having to activate a specific key function to retrieve any message regardless of its content.
Moreover, as the conventional SMS function is designed for a mobile station to store all received short messages into a non-volatile memory (i.e., EEPROM or flash memory) regardless of the content of the message, the user is unable to use the memory space efficiently. Thus, an improved SMS function is needed to display in real time the short public notice or the advertisement message being sent sporadically by the service provider, without storing the received short message into the memory.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a control device and method for displaying in real time a public notice or advertisement message sent by the communication service provider to a mobile station, without first storing the message into the memory and without performing the request specially designed to retrieve the message from the memory.
According to the embodiment of the present invention, a control device for displaying the received short public notice or advertisement message in real time in a digital mobile station includes a volatile memory for temporarily storing the short public notice or advertisement message to be accessed in real time; a display unit having a message screen capable of displaying the received short public notice or advertisement message, which is temporally stored in the volatile memory, at one end of the message screen of the display unit, upon receiving the short message; a detector for detecting a predefined identifier attached to the short message to identify the short message; and, a control unit for controlling the short message to be stored into the volatile memory temporally and to be displayed on one end of the display unit in real time.
The present invention will now be described more specifically with reference to the drawings attached only by way of example.